1Pierre Manent, a World Beyond Politics? a Defense of the Nation-State, Trans
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CPSA Rome as the model Imperial Republic for the Eighteenth Century Richard Steele, The Christian Hero : “Why is it that the Heathen struts, and the Christian sneaks in our Imagination?” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 9th letter from the mountain : “You [Genevan bourgeois] are neither Romans, nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians.” James Madison, Federalist 55: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Antoine Louis de Saint Just, Rapport sur la Conjuration, OC, 735: “The world is empty since the Romans; and their memory refills it, and prophesies the return of liberty.” Pierre Manent wrote that “the French revolutionaries dreamed of Sparta and republican Rome” 1 but he neither interpreted these revolutionary dreams nor indicated that they were shared by American revolutionaries. What Manent’s statement rightly suggests is the near universal consensus 2 in the eighteenth century of Rousseau’s ranking of Romans and Spartans above Athenians. François Hartog noted that for most men of the eighteenth century Rome connoted liberty, Sparta equality and Athens anarchy. 3 Elizabeth Rawson’s The Spartan Tradition in European Thought correctly stated: “Only Rome, sometimes as a republic and sometimes as an empire, has exerted greater attraction” for Europeans but her view that liberal democrats “generally tended to idealize Sparta’s great rival, democratic Athens” ignored American 1Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, trans. Marc LePain (Princeton: University Press, 2006), 44. In 1795, Constantin-François Volney ( Oeuvres [Paris: Fayard, 1989], 602) lamented that, with respect to “names, surnames, clothes, usages, laws, everyone wanted to be Spartan or Roman.” 2Jean Louis De Lolme, John Thelwall, and Thomas Paine are exceptions to the norm. Paine ( RM) however wrote: “Athens, by representation, would have outrivalled her own democracy.” 3François Hartog, “La Révolution française et l’Antiquité,” en M. Gauchet, P. Manent et P. Rosenvallon, eds., Situations de la democratie (Paris: Hautes Études-Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1993, 30-31. revolutionaries, such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Samuel Adams. 4 Samuel Adams wrote to Thomas Young on October 17, 1774: “I think our Countrymen discover the Spirit of Rome or Sparta.” 5 Paul Rahe’s Republics ancient and modern: classical republicanism and the American Revolution (1992) examined the republics of Athens and Sparta but not Rome, but when referring to American writers, Rahe provides more references to Rome than to Athens or Sparta. Legends of Rome came to America through Addison’s Cato, a drama Washington had performed in the winter at Valley forge, and which provided Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale their memorable lines “Give me liberty or give me death” and “I regret that I have only one life to lose for my country”, as well as Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters .6 Men educated in classical literature, like John Adams, could directly cite Horace in 1774: “ Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ” Shortly after the American retreat from Canada in 1776, Adams declared: “Flight was 4Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 1. Rawson says “indubitably” Rome was the model for eighteenth-century Frenchmen and women (268), briefly touches on the Federalist in an appendix (368) but states that Sparta had greatest appeal for conservative Southern slave owners (369-70). Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Politics Ancient and Modern , trans Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 8 claimed that Athens symbolized commercial freedom rather than democracy, whereas Sparta symbolized civic virtue, severity and equality but Chantal Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680- 1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 495-500 correctly indicated that eighteenth-century thinkers deprecated the anarchic character of Athenian democracy. Carthage was widely seen as a commercial republic, like Athens, but was not deprecated by the zealots for Sparta and Rome, as Athens was. Vidal-Naquet also does not explain why Montesquieu, a champion of commerce, opposed Athens for its lack of a senate and safeguards for the property of the wealthy. 5The Writings of Samuel Adams , ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York: Octagon, 1968), vol. 3, 163, 6See Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin’s introduction to Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 36 indicates that Cato’s Letters , rather than Locke or Montesquieu, were the most widely read and most cited authorities in Colonial America.. unknown to the Romans....I wish it was to the Americans.” 7 Hannah Arendt wrote: “without the classical example [of Rome] shining through the centuries, none of the men of the revolutions on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.” 8 In the entry patrie in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie , they celebrated patriotic virtue, the love of the laws and well-being of the state, so common in ancient republics and so uncommon in modern states; “Brutus, to conserve his fatherland ( patrie ), had to cut off the heads of his sons, and this action would appear unnatural ( dénaturée ) only to feeble souls. Without the death of these two traitors, Brutus’ fatherland would have died in its cradle.” 9 Jean-Louis David bodied this sentiment forth in his powerful tableau Lictors Returning to Brutus the bodies of his Sons, which together with his Oath of the Horatii served as backdrops to the French Revolution. 10 Chantal Grell wrote that while images of Rome were ubiquitous in the arts, letters and fashions of the pre-revolutionary period, and flowered once the revolution was underway, allusions to classical antiquity “were paradoxically absent in the great political 7Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics; Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 31, 67. 8Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York,: Viking, 1965), 197. 9Encylopédie, Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Neufchastel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), t. 12, 178-79. Rousseau believed that the love of one’s patrie was the source of all virtue ( Discourse on Political Economy , in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings , trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 122-3. He wrote, in Constitutional Project for Corsica , CWR, vol. 11, 152 that “the best motive force of a government is love of la patrie and this love is cultivated along with the fields.” Rousseau was by no means alone in linking agriculture with love of la patrie . See John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), chap. 3. 10 Lynn Hunt, The family romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37-8. David, who became a Jacobin and orchestrated revolutionary festivals on the model of Roman triumphs, made his peace with the Directory with his dramatic The Sabine Women Enforcing Peace by Running between the Combatants. debates” from 1780 to 1789. 11 Claude Mossé, on the contrary, found that the convocation of the Estates-General led to reflections on antiquity, especially Rome, since democratic Athens was not attractive to an assembly of notables. 12 Mona Ozouf claimed that “legendary antiquity helped the men of the Revolution, therefore, rise to the level of the events which they were living.” Ozouf does not distinguish which ancient republics and which aspects of the Roman republic appealed to the revolutionaries; since models of antiquity were purely rhetorical and fantastic, the only question of interest to Ozouf is why French revolutionaries appealed to Greece and Rome, rather than to the forests of the Franks, the source of liberty for earlier thinkers, such as François Hotman, Henri de Boulainvilliers and Montesquieu. 13 Maurizio Viroli champions the Italian city- states as republics not dependent upon slavery 14 but American and French revolutionaries did not see Florence, Sienna or Lucca (or Geneva or Bern) as alternative models of republican virtue, compared to Rome and Sparta. Why Rome? In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Marx wrote that the French revolutionaries dressed up and spoke as Romans to disguise from themselves the bourgeois limitations of their revolution; as citizens, Frenchmen had the illusion of a classless fraternity 11 Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité , 1179. 12 Claude Mossé, L’ Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 68-71. Mossé wrote (72): “Si Athènes servait de repoussoir, Rome en revanche fournissait non seulement un modèle constitutionel adaptable aux réalités de la France, mais également un arsenal juridique, où les députés pouvaient puiser, et ils ne s’en firent pas faute.” 13 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 272-75. 14 Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism , trans. Anthony Shuggar (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). (and, we might add, women like Olympe de Gouges, Manon Phlipon [Mme Roland] and Germaine de Staël thought women could be equal citizens). The young Manon Phlipon followed Rousseau in the formative influence of reading Plutarch: Manon